I might add, Solon, that to me Sherlock Holmes is a very real person, far more so than Arthur Conan Doyle. I know little about Doyle, but I know Sherlock Holmes' personality like the back of my hand ... his likes and dislikes, his philosophy of life, what he would say or do in a given situation. From what I know of Doyle, it is enough to tell me that he created Holmes as an alter-ego, a person that he, Doyle, would haved wished to be. If Doyle was a registered SI user, he might well have adopted "Sherlock Holmes" as his alias, and we might know him here as the latter personality.
Which would be fine with me, as I would enjoy engaging in dialogue with Sherlock Holmes.
We have this wonderful capacity as thinking humans to suspend reality in our minds when it suits us to do so.
However, this can be a problem if we lose the capacity to recognize what we have done, and are no longer able to distinguish reality from wishful thinking,. |
